Stimulus-Induced Temporal Illusions: When Awareness Is Mesmerized by Time

Abstract

Our subjective experience of time intervals is susceptible to the effects of the various properties of the timed stimuli/events (e.g., motion, size, affect). For instance, subjective time is considerably lengthened when observing faster and shortened when observing slower walking animations. Such effects on perceived time have been investigated widely in the field. What we do not know based on these studies is if participants are aware of these sorts of stimulus-induced timing illusions. Thus, the current study, using confidence ratings, investigated whether the participants are aware of their largely biased time perception induced by the observed walking speed in a temporal bisection task. After each categorization of a probe interval as ‘short’ or ‘long’, we asked participants to rate their confidence level regarding their categorization. We reasoned that if participants were aware of their biased time perception, the temporal modulation of confidence ratings regarding their categorization performance would not change between different walking speed conditions. We found that confidence ratings closely tracked shifts in the psychometric functions suggesting that participants were not aware of the stimulus-induced warping of perceived time. We replicated these findings in a second experiment. Our results show that human participants are not aware of the stimulus-induced temporal illusions they experience.